About

Martin Haspelmath is the second most senior scientist in the linguistics department of MPI-EVA. He studied linguistics in Vienna, Cologne, Buffalo and Moscow, and received his Ph.D. and habilitation degrees from the Freie Universität Berlin. Before moving to Leipzig in 1998, he worked at the Otto-Friedrichs-Universität Bamberg and the Università degli Studi di Pavia.

His research interests in linguistics are primarily in broadly comparative and historical morphology and syntax as well as language contact. He started out with a focus on European languages ("The European linguistic area", 2001), in particular Lezgian (A grammar of Lezgian, 1993), but more recently he sees himself as a generalist whose primary concern is the discovery and explanation of linguistic universals (The World Atlas of Language Structures, 2005; "Parametric versus functional explanation of syntactic universals", 2008). Together with several colleagues he has pioneered the approach of language comparison via specialist consortia (Loanword Typology, Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures, The Leipzig Valency Classes Project).